The Amber Room

by T. Davis Bunn

  “Maybe I will.”

  “You come see me first here, I’ll take you to the real Ukraine. And more things to buy. Real treasures.”

  “Maybe this summer,” Jeffrey said, liking the idea of a new adventure.

  The woman lost her patience, snapped at her companion and started to move away. The Ukrainian smiled, held her shoulder, and gestured with evident pride at her spirit. He soothed her with a few words and said something more which was translated as, “Five thousand dollars now. It is a lot, but I must have it now. The rest you give to your priest, along with word on when you can come with me across the border.”

  Jeffrey felt the thrill of stepping out into the unknown. “Gregor is not a priest.”

  The young man shrugged. “The honorable man, then. In a world like this, which is harder to find?”

  CHAPTER 32

  “The Baroque era in Poland,” Katya said as Jeffrey drove them out of Cracow the next morning, “was a golden age in more ways than one. During that period, the nation entered into years of relative stability and vast political power. So long as far-flung powers did not ignite the flames of war, as sometimes happened—”

  “Too often,” Gregor murmured. “For century upon century, war was seen as a valid arm of everyday politics.”

  “This stability brought unbridled economic growth to Poland,” Katya continued. “And with this growth came phenomenal wealth to the ruling classes. Poland’s location made it a bridge between empires—the Ottomans to the south, the Swedes and the Prussians to the north, the Muscovites in the east, and the tottering Holy Roman Empire to the west. For much of this period, the Polish-Lithuanian empire was the only one of these powers that was not at war.”

  “A bridge of culture, and a bridge of trade,” Gregor agreed. “For seven months a year, ice closed off all the northern seas, so that the only way to arrive to the new empire of Muscovy was overland. The only safe overland passage, with decent roads and stable government and security against brigands, was through Poland.”

  “And every time a cargo came through the empire, a bit was left behind in the form of taxes and payments and trades,” Katya finished. “Since there were fewer wars to drain the coffers of either government or commerce, the gentry grew rich.”

  “Incredibly so,” Gregor said. “Sadly, the wars that swept through this land afterward left little evidence of what Poland possessed. But believe me, my dear boy. Poland once set the definition of what it meant to be wealthy.”

  “A will dated 1640 tells of one woman’s estate,” Katya said. “She left five thousand diamonds and emeralds to her daughters. And she was not a princess nor a queen, Jeffrey, simply the wife of a wealthy landowner. Another landowner of this same period left his children a cloak woven of solid gold thread, embossed with eight hundred rubies. Yet another deeded to just one of her children over eight thousand pearls.”

  The hills lining the new four-lane highway to Czestochowa were speckled white with old snow. The lower reaches nestled beneath a gently falling mist, the sky descending to wrap distant hills in ghostly veils. Ancient castles and hilltop monasteries emerged from the haze-like painted apparitions before melting from view. Jeffrey decided he had never seen a more beautiful winter landscape.

  “When the pillage of this great land began,” Gregor said, “the stories that circulated spoke of wealth beyond the greediest of imaginations. Warlords swept in like packs of wolves following the scent of a fresh kill. One country estate contained so much art that the Swedes required one hundred and fifty wagons to cart it away. Another castle, which fell to the Austrian army, listed over seven thousand paintings in its archives.”

  Tree-lined rivers appeared from time to time, impressionist glimpses that flowed into the white-shrouded distance. Carefully tended farms gave way to forests of silver birches, tall and graceful and otherworldly in the floating mists.

  “But during the period of stability,” Katya went on, “this outward display of wealth was carried over into how Poles worshiped. By this time, the Polish Catholic church was referred to simply as ‘our church.’ Rome was scarcely granted the time of day. The Vatican was so embroiled in trying to keep the Holy Roman Empire from scattering to the winds that little more than passing complaint was made. At least the name Catholic was kept.”

  “Keep in mind as well,” Gregor added, “that the tide of Protestantism swept much of Europe at the onset of this era. While wars scarred the face of many countries, Poland opened its arms to all sects, including many that even the Protestant church considered too heretical.”

  “I love it when you two do this,” Jeffrey said.

  Gregor showed genuine surprise. “Do what?”

  “Trade off on each other. Tell a story together.”

  Gregor looked at Katya in surprise. “Were we doing that?”

  “I don’t know,” Katya replied.

  “Yes you were, and it’s great,” Jeffrey assured them. “Please continue.”

  “Very well,” Gregor agreed. “Where was I?”

  “Heretics.”

  “Ah, yes. Thank you. Calvinists formed a very large colony here under the protection of the king. Lutherans dominated several regions, converting even the ruling princes. Aryans, who were condemned by every other church body in Europe, populated several cities. There was even a point when a majority of the Sejm, Poland’s parliament, was Protestant. In the almost two centuries that religious terror and oppression swept through the rest of Europe, only seven people were sentenced in Poland for religious crimes, and five of them were Catholics convicted of burning down a Protestant church. When a Papal envoy arrived to complain, the Polish king was heard to say, ‘Permit me to rule over the goats as well as the sheep.’ At a time when other countries, Protestant and Catholic alike, were torturing people before burning them at the stake just for reading the wrong book, upholding the cause of human rights like this was extraordinary.”

  “Many historians feel that it was precisely because of this liberal attitude that Poland eventually returned to the religion of its heritage,” Katya went on. “In any case, by the middle of the eighteenth century, Catholicism was again the predominant form of worship, and churches in wealthier regions reaped the benefits of their princes’ and patrons’ riches.”

  “Regions such as Czestochowa,” Gregor added.

  Katya nodded. “One patron decided such an important painting of the Madonna and Child needed to be clothed in robes of more than just paint and so gave a cloak of woven gold and encrusted diamonds. Another donated a cloak of gold and emeralds. Another of silver and rubies. Yet another had an embossed metal plate designed and covered with a sheet of hammered gold, then set in the wall to slide over and protect the painting when it was not being viewed.”

  “So what is so important about this painting?” Jeffrey asked.

  Katya glanced at Gregor, who smiled and nodded. “After you, my dear.”

  “It’s hard to separate fact from legend,” Katya began. “All that can be said for sure is the original painting is at least one thousand five hundred years old.”

  “What?”

  “That is the minimum,” Gregor confirmed. “But being an incurable romantic, I prefer the legend.”

  “So do I,” Katya agreed.

  “Which is?” Jeffrey pressed.

  “That it was painted by Luke on the tabletop from the holy family’s home in Bethlehem,” Katya replied.

  “Luke, as in the writer in the Bible?”

  “There is much to argue that the story might be true,” Gregor said. “Legends and early historians both agree that it is so. There is also another image of Mary and the Christ-child in Florence, Italy, which authorities insist was also painted by Luke. The two paintings are remarkably similar.”

  “This one was reportedly taken from Jerusalem by the Roman Emperor Constantine around the year 300,” Katya continued. “Constantine stopped Rome’s persecutions of Christians when he himself was converted. He is said to have placed thi
s painting in his own chapel, where it remained for over six hundred years. By that time, the eastern Holy Roman Empire was collapsing. Constantinople was warring with enemies on every side, including some of its own provinces. Allies were desperately needed. In return for an oath of fealty, the painting was given to Prince Lev of Rus, as the lands to the north were then known. Prince Lev moved it to his own palace at Belz, where it remained until 1382, when his descendant Prince Vladislaus decided to relocate it to a new monastery he was starting in Czestochowa.”

  “All of this is carefully documented, I assure you,” Gregor added. “From the gift of the painting to Prince Lev in the year 900 to today, the deeds of authentication still exist. The only question is whether it was truly painted by Saint Luke.”

  “In 1430 the monastery was attacked by bandits,” Katya went on. “The painting was shattered by sword blows. The king ordered it restored no matter what the cost, but painters were unable to make their colors hold fast to the old picture.”

  “We know now that the reason was that very early painters made their primitive colors hold true by fusing them onto the wood with a wax coating,” Gregor explained. “But at the time it was an international calamity. There are records within the monastery of letters from all over the civilized world, asking for reports on the progress of repairs.”

  “So the painters put a new coating on the repaired tabletop,” Katya said, “and then painted the picture again. They kept to the original as exactly as possible, except for one thing. On Mary’s face they painted in a long jagged scar, to show for as long as the painting existed that it once had been desecrated.”

  * * *

  Czestochowa proved to be, in effect, two cities in one. The outlying town was the same collection of dreary buildings flanking pitted and crumbling streets they had seen everywhere in Eastern Europe. The inner city, however, the hill of Jasna Gora, was something else entirely.

  The hill was separated from the rest of the city by a broad expanse of gradually rising green, bordered by a series of glass-fronted restaurants and gift shops. Beyond their covered ways, a number of enterprising capitalists had set up suitcase-stands; several dozen competing boom-boxes blared out a cacophony of religious music, while other sellers let postcards and picture books flutter in the breeze.

  The hilltop was buttressed with red-brick fortress walls; these descended far below the footbridge that crossed from the paved walkway to the first of three vast ornamental gates. The hill took a swooping dip down into a grass-covered canal before joining the fortress at the base of what once had been a very deep moat. Small, barred windows rimmed the brick facade above the ancient, mossy waterline.

  Beyond the first wall came a second and beyond that a third, each marked by guard towers and high stone gates crowned with royal seals. And past the third gate rose a village from another era, lined with narrow cobblestone streets which wound amidst ancient buildings and stone fountains with time-sanded facades. Windows wore hand-drawn panes that flowed downward with the patience of centuries.

  At one end of a cobblestone plaza rose the church, where a steady stream of people made their way through high arched portals. Jeffrey stood far enough inside to be protected from the wind while Katya and Gregor bought books from nuns at a glass-fronted stall. He watched the faces that passed. Over and over he found himself inspecting hardened features with eyes that showed a surprisingly gentle light.

  The painting was not in the main church at all, but in a side chapel that could be called small only when compared to the central hall. It was reached through a series of three other chapels, each of which could easily have held a thousand people. Each had a multitude of naves and alcoves and doors leading to still more chapels and prayer rooms. All these ancient halls had been renovated several centuries ago in lavish Baroque style. Distant ceilings bore ornate and gilded frescoes surrounding religious paintings, with these in turn encircled by cherubim heralding the King’s return on long, silvered trumpets.

  After this parade of wealth and glitter, the painting’s chapel was positively plain. There were no marble-pillared side chapels bearing massive paintings, nor giant gilded angels, nor rising ranks of candles, nor elaborate chandeliers. Mosaic floorings, tapestries, and ceiling pictures had no place here. The floor was hard granite worn smooth and grooved by six centuries of pilgrims’ feet. Jeffrey passed through the ancient oak door, looked around the small entrance portico, and wondered what all the fuss was about. Then he turned the corner, entered the chapel proper, and saw the nave.

  The church’s front section was protected by floor-to-ceiling iron bars, connected by a gilded, hand-wrought pattern of leaves and vines. Great double doors were swung open, and chairs were set in cramped rows up to the banister and communion table.

  The altar reached up almost to the distant ceiling, a massive structure covered with intricately detailed scenes. The apostles gathered to either side, life-sized bas-reliefs whose hands held scrolls and books and lifted them up to the angels on high. And in the center was the painting of the Black Madonna.

  She was not black at all, but rather had an olive-skinned complexion that could have been called dark only by light-skinned medieval folk who never in their lives had seen a southerner. Her face had the stiffness and lack of expression Jeffrey had seen in very early religious mosaics. Her eyes were slender as tears and slanted upward. The Christ-child in her arms was a miniature rendition of his mother. Whatever the actual date of the painting, one thing was utterly clear in that first glimpse; it was very, very old.

  The painting was gilded like an icon and hung above the chapel’s central cross and altar. Penitents made circles around the front chamber on their knees, murmuring prayers in time to those who sat in the front rows. Jeffrey followed Katya to the last row of seats and sat down beside her. An older woman moved forward; he stood and offered his seat. He then backed up against one of the central pillars, not at all sorry for the chance to look around.

  Perhaps six hundred people were standing and kneeling and sitting in the chapel, and this was a midweek morning of no special importance. Jeffrey bowed his head and said the Lord’s Prayer. As he spoke, he had the fleeting impression of all their softly murmured voices melting together to form one great prayer sent lofting upward, all joined as though spoken from one great heart.

  Hearts. He opened his eyes, looked around the chamber, and saw that the old stone walls were not quite so plain as he had first thought.

  Tiny silver hearts were hammered into the walls, hundreds of thousands of silent witnesses presented by believers who wished to testify that prayers had been answered. Jeffrey looked out across the chamber and found himself bound to the six hundred years of believers who had come and worshiped within these same walls. How many had known the questions he faced? How many had yearned for more understanding, more wisdom, more knowledge of the Lord? How many had come and stood and thirsted?

  Mass began. Katya was too caught up in her own prayers and the priest’s message to come back to him and translate. Jeffrey did not mind. It was enough to stand and listen to words he did not understand, surrounded by people he did not know, and yet somehow be filled with the feeling, the knowledge, that he was not alone.

  Here in these foreign surroundings was a flavor of something he could not explain. Jeffrey stood by the ancient pillar in an alien church in an alien nation and was filled with an absolute certainty that he was in the presence of something greater than himself. He stood and inspected his heart and yearned for a greater knowledge of his Savior.

  His mind touched on concepts that he only half understood. His heart knew the longings of one not yet fulfilled, yet in some strange way the act of honest searching brought him joy. He was aware of a contentment that came not despite his lack of wisdom but rather because he hungered for more. He watched the others with eyes that searched inward, and he realized that always before he had seen his hunger as a fault, a failing, when in truth it was a gift. It forced him to continue walking, keep
searching, keep struggling to throw off his burden of isolation from his Lord.

  His eyes were drawn back to the walls and their silent, shining testimonies, and he somehow felt a kinship with the centuries of thankful messages. One alcove was given over to crutches—tiny ones for children, ivory-tipped canes for the elderly, crutches of every size and make and description—rising up the trio of high walls and covering every inch of space. Two other alcoves were full of crosses and rosaries and medallions bearing prayers of thanks in a multitude of languages.

  But the majority of space was for the hearts. None larger than his hand, some as small as a fingernail, they covered half a dozen alcoves, each with three walls ninety feet wide. A silver sea of thankful hearts.

  CHAPTER 33

  As they emerged from the church into the damp chill, Gregor patted Jeffrey’s arm. “Thank you for allowing me to be a part of this. And thank you both for the Mass.”

  “I hope it wasn’t too boring for you,” Katya said, taking hold of Jeffrey’s other hand.

  “I enjoyed it,” Jeffrey replied. “I learned a lot.”

  Katya smiled up at him. “And what did you learn from a sermon given in Polish?”

  “I don’t know if I can put it into words.”

  Gregor nodded his understanding. “The most valuable of lessons are seldom those that can be restricted by man’s puny tongue. Especially at first.”

  They descended the hill and walked to the city’s one large hotel, a glass and steel structure designed in the best of Communist sixties style. While they shed their coats and scarfs and gloves at the cloakroom, Jeffrey glanced into the restaurant. “These places all look the same, don’t they.”

  Katya did not need to turn around to understand. “All such hotels were built around the same time. All the menus were printed by the central supply office for all restaurants. All the chairs and tables and plates and glasses for all Polish restaurants were manufactured by the same factories.”